Wednesday, 6 February 2013

Finding a Classic Classic

I have never tried to rewrite or adapt a
classic book, but characters from classic stories and nursery rhymes
have certainly made many a guest appearance in my picture book work.
Little Red Riding Hood, the three bears, the big bad wolf, the three
little pigs and others, have all had walk-on parts. Their presence has
leant these stories a certain familiarity and made it seem as if all
these nursery characters, whether mine or somebody else’s creation,
inhabit their own, real world where new stories may be happening,
unrecorded, all the time; much as the cartoon characters in Toon Town in
the film Roger Rabbit. I find that idea quite reassuring. One only has
to enter that world to discover a completely new adventure.

It sometimes takes a long time for a book
to worm its way into my heart. I have to re-read it and flick through
its pages again and again, savouring sentences and studying
illustrations, seeing how the ink sits on the page. Then it becomes like
an old and trusted friend.One of my favourite classic books is
Treasure Island, but I didn’t fully appreciate its brilliance until the
right edition came along and everything clicked. I first became familiar
with Treasure Island through the film starring Robert Newton who, with
his greasy beard and rheumy eye, created the archetypal screen pirate.
‘Arrr, Jim lad!’ When I did eventually turn to the book, I
was a bit disappointed. I have the same problem with music – it takes
me years, sometimes, to appreciate what many people seem to get straight
away! Anyway, the book didn’t quite work for me, until I found an
edition that I fell in love with.

This was illustrated by one of my heroes,
Mervyn Peake, where everything seemed to be right – the design and
layout, the quality of the paper and, of course, Peake’s wonderful
illustrations. Here was a pirate that enhanced the character on the
page, and surpassed the screen version, which now began to look rather
cartoony. Peake’s Long John Silver is so real you can almost smell the
salt and sweat on his clothes.

All of a sudden the story came alive and I appreciated
Stevenson’s wonderful and economic writing for the first time. Could there be a
better opening passage to an adventure book:

"I
remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his
sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy,
nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue
coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut
across one cheek, a dirty livid white. I remember him looking round the cove
and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old
sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:-

‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest-

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’"

Treasure Island
still has a hold on me, and I find pirates popping up in my stories all the
time. Each has something of either Robert Newton, Robert Louis Stevenson, or
Mervyn Peake in them, whether it’s Captain Cut-throat, leader of the band of
lady pirates in my Charlie Small adventures, or Captain Bonedust in Alfie
Small’s first journal. But to create a character as real, as devious, but as
appealing as Long John Silver, now that would be something!

I don’t know if anyone else has to find the right edition of a classic
to really connect with it, but it happens to me quite a lot. With this 1976
edition of Treasure Island, I found a book that felt absolutely right as a
physical, functional object. Any other edition is not quite the same somehow,
and I certainly think Ebooks will have a hard job replicating the qualities of
classics like this, that make them such a pleasure to hold and own and love.
Don’t you?